Latte, Lanyards and Livery
Sometimes you make the strangest of connections. How does a peremptory request for sugar, and a smurf-blue shirt connect with the visual symbolism of service and lordship?
A Case of mistaken identity.
“Excuse me, young man; where do you keep your sugar?”
It’s happening again. The lady had the air of a certain type of Bathonian. Monied. Proprietorial. Used to having her commands obeyed.
The use of the phrase ‘young man’ (this story happened some years ago, but I was still well beyond the point at which I looked like that would be an obvious and appropriate form of address) would have been bad enough. What made it worse was that I didn’t work in the coffee shop. I was on my lunch break, buying a coffee and a pastry in much the same way as she was. True enough, I was in uniform; but it was not the same as that of the coffee shop staff. Theirs’ comprised an imperial purple polo-shirt, the company logo over their heart and the company’s name across the back, from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I, by contrast, was in a bright blue, long-sleeved and collared shirt, my organisation’s logo, about a centimetre across, embroidered at the top corner of the breast pocket. I also wore a tie, in a not-quite-clashing darker blue (the rich blue tones we wore had led us to be termed ‘smurfs’ – a name we had taken upon ourselves with a mix of gallows humour and perverse pride).
This was not the first time this had happened, either. Fast food outlets, supermarkets, stationary suppliers: I would routinely get asked for a particular item’s whereabouts, or to fetch something – at least the woman who accosted me in WH Smith’s to ask whether we stocked ‘Quilt Now’ had the excuse that we wore a similar blue. In this case one would have thought there was little room for error. This lady’s brand awareness was non-existent, but the truth is that we are accustomed to recognising certain types of clothing as denoting a certain social and cultural type. Corporate clothing is an inherent part of the visual fabric of our culture and we respond instinctively to it.
It occurred to me, as I reflected on this latest of incidents (as a medieval historian, I am prone to this kind of geeky passing thought) that medieval society was similarly attuned to the wearing of corporate dress. Throughout the middle ages it was far more common for people to wear the uniform of their employee.
Singing for your supper, medieval style…
The medieval term for such uniform is ‘livery’, which derives from the French livrer "to dispense, or hand over”, a cognate to the English word ‘deliver’. Livery is actually quite a broad term, encompassing anything that a master might give his servant, including food, lodging, arms, even land. Equally the service in return for which the livery was given could vary considerably too. As well as household servants (very much akin to the ‘liveried servants’ of Jane Austen’s upper-class households), men could receive livery for service such as soldiering, or legal representation. Roland le Petour was obliged to perform at the court of the English king Henry II every Christmas, providing “Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum” - one jump, one whistle, and one fart. As his name suggests (le Petour translates as ‘the Farter’) he was one of a number of professional farters, a real thing in the middle ages (despite what people might say, you didn’t have to make your own entertainment in those days, although the X-Factor it clearly wasn’t).
Anyway, what we are interested in here should more properly be called ‘livery of robes’. (Actually, what you are all now interested in is Roland’s party piece. It’s not going to be on YouTube, but go off and Google it. I can wait). These were gifts, normally of cloth rather than completed garments; it was down to the receiving individual to have the cloth made up into suits of clothes. The gifts were at least annual, and bi-annual for the more important within the household, the cloth being given so that the new clothes could be worn at the two great Church feasts of Christmas and Pentecost.
The outlay for the lord could be considerable as their households were extensive. As an example, Edward III’s accounts for 1360 records the liveries made for the royal household in preparation for the Christmas celebrations. Everyone from the King, Queen, princes and princesses, honoured guests (the king of France and several of his noblemen were staying at court, having been captured at Poitiers), household servants (the valets and squires and night watchmen, the sailors and bargemen, as well as the king’s priest and clerks, the falconers and those who worked in the stables etc.), all received cloth. Those slightly further afield: the Master and students at King’s College, Cambridge for example, or the pensioned injured veterans of royal service, received material too. In all, maybe three hundred people were supplied with clothing, cloth and furs to be worn in celebration of Christmas. Their status within the great machine of the household was marked by the quantity and quality of the cloth. The more important one’s social position the greater amount of cloth one was given, allowing one to have made more voluminous (and thereby impressive) clothes. Similarly, the more expensive and exotic the fur supplied for lining the garment (often only to edge the garment, as a mark of status, rather than to fully line it for warmth) then the higher the individual’s status was: ermine for the royals, squirrel, rabbit and lamb for those further down the order, and none at all for the lowest.
It was not just the royal household that did this. It was an integral part of being a lord or a knight that one had servants (indeed the keeping of at least one domestic servant was common, and a sign of respectability, amongst even the middle classes until the Second World War), and such servants should be supplied with livery. Outside of the aristocracy, liveries were also worn within the towns. The guilds – associations set up to protect and regulate a particular trade - provided livery to their members (who are still known today as ‘liverymen’). With the rise of the merchant and professional middle class in the thirteenth century, non-nobles were also clothing their servants in livery. Other forms of dress also occurred: priests, monks and friars in clerical vestments and habits, scholars, lawyers and clerks in their gowns and robes, of which academics still wear the vestiges today at graduation (or at dinner and during exams if you are an Oxford or Cambridge student, but, as we all know the Oxbridge Colleges are centuries behind the rest of the world… and proud of it). On the darker side particular communities could be marked out by having clothing prescribed for them. The medieval Jewish community, for example, was often required to wear a badge (a yellow circle in France, Spain and Italy, one in the shape of the tablets of law in England, whilst in Germany a special, pointed hat was mandated), whilst prostitutes in some Italian cities were required to wear distinctive items of clothing to differentiate them from “decent” women.
The Dunstable Jewel is the most exquisite example of a high-status livery badge. About an inch in height, depth and width, this enamelled fourteenth-century object must have been for one of the highest adherents to the Lancastrian royal house. (© The Trustees of the British Museum.)
Clothes maketh the man?
Hierarchy is marked in clothing today as it was in the middle ages. Those in positions of management will rarely be seen in corporate livery. Instead they wear their own clothes. If one is being cynical the reason for this is that they are not ‘servants’ as such (in that they are not providing the direct service). If they do have to deal with the public the wearing of ‘normal’ clothing makes them an individual - a real human being - rather than a functionary of the organisation, a cog in the machine as it were. If formally attired in business suit and tie there is an air of gravitas that will receive respect. Just as with a medieval lord (who would never wear livery) it is how management marks themselves as distinct from the lower level staff.
That is not to say that they are wholly unmarked. Managers are, after all, employees of the company, and as such count as retainers themselves. In a similar fashion, within medieval society lords who retained servants might well be retained themselves within a network of patron and client relationships running right up to the king. Such noblemen could not be expected to wear servants’ livery every day (although, as we have seen they might wear the ‘corporate colour’ for the festivities of Easter or Pentecost) instead they marked their allegiance using badges and collars.
The badge could vary hugely in style and form. Simple cloth ones might be handed out in their thousands. This is what Richard III did at his coronation, presumably so that the well-wishers lining the streets would all show their loyalty for him by pinning his white boar badge to their clothes. others might be made of cheap cast pewter. More limited would be gilt badges for close retainers, and, for the most noble of adherents, there were remarkable high-status jewellery, like the three-dimensional gold and enamelled swan known as the Dunstable Jewel.
Badges were not unique to an individual. Unlike heraldry - where each coat of arms was (in theory) distinct from every other - different nobles might select a very similar, or the same, badge. Badges could also be linked to a title rather than a family name. The bear and ragged staff of the Earls of Warwick were used by the Beauchamp, Neville and Dudley holders of the title; each noble adopting it on their accession to the Earldom (taking up the franchise, if you will).
Edward Fiennes de Clinton, !st Earl of Lincoln, wearing his livery collar. Edward Fiennes de Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln, by Unknown artist (oil on panel, 1584) NPG 900 © National Portrait Gallery, London
A livery collar is effectively a chain made up of badges. The most famous of the middle ages was the collar of Esses - a series of interlinked letter S with a pendant badge (which varied depending on which monarch had given the collar. For example, it was a swan for Henry IV, V and VI but the Tudor Rose for the Henry VII, Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth). There is, a modern exemplar - the security card lanyard. Unlike the livery collar these are, of course, practical items. They are supposed to keep an ID card on display, or stop one losing one’s keys or access cards. Increasingly, however, they have become an integral part of corporate livery; printed with the company's name or logo. In the same manner as uniform, but in a more subtle way, they display the wearer’s membership of the corporation. In a broader sense they are indicative of the wearer’s status. Like the livery collar, they are a more subtle symbol of the wearer’s affinity with the giver. That an access card or security pass is normally hanging from the end of it, reinforces this message of status; like the chains of office of royal officials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the wearing of a lanyard announces that you have access to areas unavailable to others.
The function of this livery - whether badge or clothing - was much the same as with the corporate clothing with which I began this piece. Although one of the aims was to ensure that one’s dependents were properly clothed (for some servants the livery was the only clothing they had to wear) and formed part of their wages (interestingly, this is something that clothing company Monsoon was recently been brought up on by the government – giving discounts for staff to buy clothes from the store to wear at work – in order to showcase the company’s product, but then off-setting that discount against their wages), the primary aim was to display to the world that these were your people, working for you. It was a reflection of your importance and status. There’s a proprietorial aspect to the issuing and wearing of livery - the wearer is to some extent the giver’s property (badges were used on things as well as people - think the McDonald's logo on the wall, on the windows, on the cups and boxes and napkins and...well…. everything including the staff’s shirts and hats and name tags).
It's not pure self-aggrandisement. The person who is wearing your livery is representing you, acting in your name. They are easier to hold to account for their behaviour (one of the most frequent arguments for maintaining school uniform).
All of this makes, livery sound very one-sided and authoritarian - the giver of the livery gains status in the eyes of the world, and has power over the wearer of the livery, marking them as his property. This is often how we see it today. Just as the lady in the coffee shop had with me, we are conditioned to dismiss the individual within the corporate uniform as a mere functionary, a low-level wage-slave. However, those wearing livery gained from it too.
On a very basic level, they got clothes - not something to be sniffed at in the middle ages. Unlike the modern corporate uniform, the livery was for many the only set of clothes they owned. Beyond this, being retained was also a big deal. In medieval society there was a quid pro quo to being a retained servant. You gave your loyalty and labour and in return you received the support and protection of those to whom you were indented. It made you part of something bigger. A master-less man (or, even worse, a master-less woman) was not a modern stick-it-to-the-man independent, free thinking aspirational figure. A master-less man, one without connections, was at best vulnerable, and at worse marked you as a vagrant and a trouble-maker to be hounded out of town. Being retained (which is not the same as being ‘unfree’ - a serf or slave) provided legal protections and political clout.
This reciprocal relationship between patron and client (a reference to classical Rome, but apt here) could cause problems. In England in the fourteenth century lords were providing livery to men of low social standing, not as retainers or household servants, but in order that they should pursue the noble's private quarrels. These men were going on to commit acts of extortion, robbery and kidnap, protected from prosecution by the patronage of the magnate whose badge they wore. When Parliament decided to do something about the problem they chose not to condemn or punish the behaviour of the nobles, nor to restrict the right and ability of nobles to retain men, but on their right to issue the badge, as if restricting the latter would automatically curtail the abuses of the former.
Was medieval man more attuned to the liveries that they saw around them?
I suspect they were. I think it meant more. Today people wear companies’ liveries all the time, even when they aren’t employed by them. They display maker’s marks - Nike, Adidas, Louis Vuitton - as markers of personal status and conspicuous consumption. People wear sweatshirts proclaiming Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard Universities, even though they are neither students nor alumni. We are surrounded by the badges of companies on clothes, on billboards, television, and phones. I wonder if we are all like the lady in the coffee shop, blinded by it all, unable to see the nuance inherent in the display.
Was there ever a medieval equivalent to my coffee shop woman (obviously not in a coffee shop; they hadn’t been invented yet)?
I don’t know. If there was, I am sure that the response to a misidentification could be something more ‘medieval’ than my own. I was in livery. Even at lunch I was representing my organisation. As a result, I was polite. I turned to the lady, and, with a disarming smile, said, “actually I’m sorry to say that I don’t work here, but the sugar is just there by your left hand”.
Selected readings:
Robert W. Jones, 'A silver boar on Bosworth Field: the significance of the livery badge on the medieval battlefield.' Coat of Arms, (3rd ser.) 11 (2015), part 1: no. 229.
Sara Jablon, ‘Badge of dishonor: Jewish Badges in medieval Europe.’ International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education Volume 8 (2015) - Issue 1.
Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince. (Woodbridge, 1980)
Nigel Saul, ‘The Commons and the Abolition of Badges.’ Parliamentary History, Vol. 9, (1990).
Matthew Ward, The Livery Collar in Late Medieval England and Wales: Politics, Identity and Affinity (Woodbridge, 2016)
